Wrapping

The contenders for the Foreign Language Oscar in 2008 were The Baader Meinhof Complex, Revanche, Waltz With Bashir, The Class and Departures. Departures, which I saw on the weekend, was the winner. It’s a good film but not in the competition when you compare it with Waltz with Bashir and The Class – both films that I loved and which experimented a bit with form. Both a little more interesting.

Having said that, Departures made me think of my mother, it made me cry and only resorted to sentimentality in the last part of the film. It’s about a very good looking musician (Masahiro Motoki) who becomes an “encoffinator”, a "nokanshi", a professional who prepares the recently deceased for their funerals. The most interesting part of the film is the insights into Japanese traditions and also into contemporary culture. In traditional society it seems that one of the rituals is to wash the body of the dead person in front of the family. This is a highly ritualised event taking place in the tatami room with the kneeling members of the family in rows and the nokanshi at the front, slowly and methodically wiping the body, plugging the orifices and dressing the person in a fresh kimono.

It’s likely that this tradition is dying (sorry) away as the Japanese gradually take on the Western habit of whipping the body away quickly to the funeral parlour. I’m guessing about this after spending some time trying to research what is current in Japan. Departures implies that this is the case. (I found a good description of a Japanese funeral on the website Traditions and customs from all over the world. I also discovered that almost all descriptions of Japanese funerals come from the same source and are repeated word for word all over the web – one writer with a lot of clout.)

The lead actor developed the idea for the film while he was in India. Varanasi is a place where dying is front and centre and the rituals have both a spiritual and a pragmatic edge to them that has quite an impact. The bodies of dead people are placed on funeral pyres and burnt and it is not uncommon to see people bearing the wrapped dead body through the alley ways to the funeral ghat. It's often confronting but real. The film made me think about my mother; I didn’t see her after she died (through choice) and always feel ambivalent about that decision. Film director, Yojiro Takita films the nokanshi scenes slowly and beautifully though not everything is romantised; the first corpse that the fledging nokanshi deals with has been dead for two weeks and is not a pretty sight. It reminded me that I also saw Sunshine Cleaning this year, an American film that deals with the ways in which we manage cleaning up after deaths though this is not its central interest.

Writing in an online magazine Curator, Makoto Fujimura says:

“The Japanese have the ability, and the unwritten code of honor, to make all acts, however mundane, beautiful and refined. There’s no reason why they cannot apply the same principle to acting as they do to every other task. When I was coming back to the airport from Tokyo, I saw several elderly workers clean the elevator belts with sanitized towels because of the flu threat. They had developed the “art” of the belt cleaning, each with a distinctive style. Every subway announcer, Koshien (high school baseball) cheerleader, department store elevator operator, and gas station attendant all take pride in what they do and create unique signature to their “art.”

Japan is also a gift culture, where things are wrapped and presented beautifully. It is a country full of artful wax models of dishes served in restaurants (a welcome sight for gaijin visitors), and anything bought in the stores is wrapped carefully and diligently. So it is no surprise that there is such an art form of nokanshi, a delicate ritual of wrapping the dead.”

This is one of the most interesting things I’ve read about Departures. It connects with what I think of as the introverted nature of Japanese society; the way in which emotions are hidden away too. For example, we are given little idea that the nokanshi’s wife is unhappy in her new home until she discovers what her husband is really doing (she thought he worked in travel) and then she lets go with her grief and anger. Emotions are tightly wrapped; as tightly wrapped as the stiff hands of the dead bodies in the film. There is an artificial gloss on many things. Takita depicts this part of Japan as less glossy and more real. The bath-house, which is clearly slowly dying too, is shabby but comforting as is the place where the nokanshi and his wife live.

In an interview with Takita, he is asked about the location.

“The location should be in wild nature, since the theme relates to "death." I especially focused on snow. [Snow] sometimes looks so beautiful, but at other times, it makes life so difficult. Snow can be a symbol of the difficulty of life. Now, Japan is quite tired, both in Tokyo and in other local areas, in terms of the economy and other aspects. In such a situation, people tend to forget about important things that have been there. As you know, the theme [of the film] is "death," but I wanted to portray fragility and beauty that are fading away. So I selected the Shnai area in Yamagata prefecture for the location."

Fragility and beauty are fading away. In an interview with a contemporary nokanshi, Okuyama, some aspects of contemporary life are highlighted.

“The bodies sometimes reflect the social situation of the deceased. Last spring, Okuyama treated the bodies of many deceased people who had committed suicide by inhaling hydrogen sulfide gas they had created by mixing household chemicals. Last winter, meanwhile, the number of bodies of middle-aged men she dealt with increased. The deceased were dispatched workers who apparently had lost hope and killed themselves after being laid off from their companies, Okuyama said.”

Japan is changing rapidly – like all societies – and there are casualties.

Takita, who also made The Yen Family, doesn’t have quite the same touch as my favourite Japanese film maker Koreada. Departures is no match for a film like After Life. At the end, it succumbs to an unnecessary sentimentality and there’s probably one too many lingering glance. But is a film that takes you places and makes you think about important topics. And made me remember and cry over my mother, whose birthday is would have been on the 26th of October.

Blessed?

Like several films I have seen this year, Blessed begins with images of people sleeping. The faces of the seven teenagers at rest, some in their own beds, one sprawled amongst a few sleeping bodies and two children who are asleep under a bridge. Watching, I thought how rarely I see anyone asleep except the cat. It’s a rare intimacy – the unguarded softened face at rest.

The central theme of this film is the connection between mothers and their children and this plays out in the division of the film. The opening half focuses on the children and is shot in tight close-ups. The latter half is called ‘Mothers’ and the camera angle widens; we see more of each family’s context, both literally and metaphorically.

I wanted to like this film. It’s set in the western suburbs of Melbourne though there are few actual markers of this landscape (Noise, released a couple of years ago, conveyed the physical landscape the west much more potently, as did the film My Year Without Sex, though what these film makers choose to show is quite different). So it’s set in the place I have lived the greater part of my life and focuses on the lives of teenagers. I’ve spent a lot of time with teenagers from the West. I was deeply interested in how filmmaker Ana Kokkinos would represent these things.

The theme is also powerful; Kokkinos talks about ‘that connection between them (mothers and children) is primal, so powerful, and no matter what shit’s going down, at the end of the day there’s that incredible capacity to return to the mother’s embrace.’ And there’s one extended scenes which shows this; involving the Miranda Otto character Bianca and her daughter Stacey. Stacey has been in trouble (I won’t describe what it is) and her mother opens the front door of their house to discover both her daughter and a policewoman. Later, as she shuts the door, she gives Stacey a complicit smile. “I did this once, she says”. It’s a response that should have come after a parental blast about bad behaviour but Bianca is half-pissed and not capable of reacting appropriately. Then later that night, Stacey opens the door of her mother’s bedroom, her mother lifts the doona and Stacey snuggles in next to her mum. Shit goes down, shit is forgiven. It feels real, this scene.

A lot of the film failed to persuade. I think two things were happening. The actors were just a tad too middle class in presentation (teenage girls with perfect skin, neutral middle class accents, delivering lines without the almost essential uplift at the end of each sentence – that badge of teenage girl uncertainty that haunts most kids I know. Drinking bourbon straight. No sign of even getting a bit giggly on it). I wasn’t convinced that they inhabited the same train line as I do. And the other problem with the film is that the large amount of intersecting plot lines means that we never develop a strong sense of any of the personalities. You could sum each character and what happens to them in one or two sentences without omitting much information. Not that this always matters. One of the best films I saw at MIFF this year was Treeless Mountain where there is a similar sparseness of information and plot development. It’s a film about the reverse issue to Blessed; about a mother who effectively abandons her very young children. But in the case of that film, we live through the pain of the young sisters by seeing events at their level, experiencing their attempts to survive and care for each other in a slow and careful script which allows the viewer to spend time with the character. Blessed felt like a gallery of semi-one dimensional “issues”.

The most interesting and believable character in the film is Rhonda (Frances O’Connor). Her young kids leave home and sleep rough for reasons which become obvious in the film. All her scenes are interesting but we find out so little about her that she seems short-changed. If I described what happens to her in the film, it would seem like a paragraph from the Herald Sun about no-hoper mothers and tragedies. Kokkinos is quoted as saying that the screenplay for the film would not hang together until she went back to the core of what attracted her in the first place: a powerful monologue in which single mother Rhonda describes her missing and neglected kids as her “blessings”. “Of all the words in the play, they resonated with me most the first time I saw it,” says Kokkinos. “If you can imagine that, as a filmmaker, there are a couple of key lines in a film that actually continue to hook you in and provide you with an emotional core to keep going, over years, no matter what.” It is a powerful moment in the film but the film goes nowhere with it. We get no further handle on Rhonda. Almost none of her behaviour is in sync with the notion that her children are her blessings yet we get little opportunity to understand why. She’s lost in a kind of film limbo and seems unfair.

I am biased. The films I have come to love emerge from the Neo-Neo Realism school of film-making. In a great article on this genre, writer A O Scott talks about the aftermath of 9/11 and other unsettling global events and what audiences therefore might be been looking for. He/she argues that, rather than necessarily wanting escapism as many pundits thought,

"what if, at least some of the time, we feel an urge to escape from escapism? For most of the past decade, magical thinking has been elevated from a diversion to an ideological principle. The benign faith that dreams will come true can be hard to distinguish from the more sinister seduction of believing in lies. To counter the tyranny of fantasy entrenched on Wall Street and in Washington as well as in Hollywood, it seems possible that engagement with the world as it is might reassert itself as an aesthetic strategy. Perhaps it would be worth considering that what we need from movies, in the face of a dismaying and confusing real world, is realism.”

I guess that many people would argue that realism pervades Blessed. But none of the characters got the time they deserved on screen so they melted into a sort of working class pastiche. A O Scott describes a number of films which fall into the category of Neo-Neo Realism and goes on to say that they serve as an antidote to the wish-fulfilment films of Hollywood.

“Not because they offer grim counsels of despair or paint lurid tableaux of desperation but rather because they take what has always seemed seductively easy about moviemaking — the camera can show us the world — and make it look hard. Their characters undergo a painful process of disillusionment, and then keep going. The disappointment they encounter — the grit with which they face it, the grace with which it is conveyed — becomes, for the audience, a kind of exhilaration.”

The ambitious scope of Blessed allows for neither grit or grace to stick around for long.

Still life with scissors

If I have a reputation for being difficult, it’s because I love the everyday and want to present it. In general people go to the movies precisely to escape the everyday.–Chantal Akerman

1975 was a big year – I finished school and Gough’s government came to an end. At the same time Chantal Akerman was releasing a film called Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. A feminist film. At that time I owned a copy of The Female Eunuch though it was more for the look on my bookshelf than a well-thumbed text. I got into Greer a bit later than this. But I thought of myself as a feminist – and still do.

I saw Jeanne Dielman for the first time on Saturday night. I might not have gone if I’d realised that it was three and a half hours long but it was fabulous. It tracks the life of a widow over three days, at times seemingly in real time, and with about 15 minutes of dialogue in the entire film. Enticing? Oui. (It was set in Belgium and described as a masterpiece of French minimalist cinema. In fact I think every film maker should see it for the quality it has of being experiential cinema. We are forced to endure the tedium of Jeanne’s life as she is living it. We become attuned to small changes in her domestic routine as harbingers of a kind of breakdown. And even though there is one major dramatic event in the film it does not linger as the talking point or provider of residual images. What does linger are the long takes of Jeanne making meat loaf, endlessly pushing and prodding the pink mince until it resembles a large and horrible visceral thing (If ever something was going to send me into a vegetarian state, it would be that scene), or the scene of her washing, endlessly, compulsively or the scene of her sitting in a chair waiting for nothing. For a long time. For a very long time cinematically. We are used now to relentless action as the mode of telling a story; this film shows another way.

Jeanne is widowed and prostitutes herself by day to make enough money to support herself and her almost grown son. Her life constructed and maintained with immense care and precision; as if a light left on inadvertently or a door left ajar will bring everything undone. It’s a film about a woman trapped in the home; trapped by financial poverty and by a kind of limited horizon that seems to be the fate of many women of that time. It reminded me of the flip side of Mad Men, the TV series now playing. All those wives at home going quietly mad. Some 2009 critics have referenced the film Revolutionary Road as a new print of Jeanne Dielman came out about the same time as Revolutionary Road. It’s not a film I liked much, I found it emotionally cold; I felt nothing for the characters. Jeanne Dielman works in a much stronger way because the film forces the viewer to sit with the tedium and pain, the quiet bleakness, the existential meaninglessness and loneliness of the life of main character. It forces you to be in the film, not to just watch which is what it felt like with the Wheelers in RR. One reviewer contrasts the films really well - (not a fan of Sam Mendez either). Kenji Fujishima describes it as “Akerman’s refusal to present easy explanations for her predicament” in contrast to Sam Mendez (in Revolutionary Road) “predictably pins it all on the suburbs and on stifling social codes regarding marriage.”

It has been described as a ‘still life film”. Scott Foundas, writing in LA Weekly, said

“ It is also about repetition and routine as a justification for existence, and
how such things might drive someone mad without anyone realizing it, least of all the person herself. That it was all told from a woman’s point of view, at a historical moment that was not particularly robust for women either as subjects or makers of films, sealed the movie’s status as a classic — albeit one that has been nearly impossible to see for the past three decades. “There was a lot about Jeanne Dielman that I didn’t understand when I wrote it,” Akerman told me in a 2004 interview. “I had a script that was quite precise, but I didn’t even know before I started the first few shots that it was going to be a long movie. After two or three days, I said to the actress, ‘You know, it’s going to be a very long movie.’ But it was not planned.””

The woman who introduced the film described it as a masterpiece of the French minimalist cinema. I know little about this. And there’s quite a bit on the web about her film making techniques including a long essay, written in the 70s by Jayne Loader. It says (the essay) as much about the concerns and language of the times as it does about the film and is a provocative read. Some of it is about technique:

“The most striking formal technique in JEANNE DIELMAN is Akerman's use of the static camera. We see Jeanne's life as if it were a painting which we have all the time in the world to study. Thus we are not manipulated by dollies in or out of space that force us to focus on some particular point of action, or by changing camera angles which hurtle us up or down emotionally. Akerman has said that she saw no reason to move the camera in her film, and for the most part I agree with her: her character's actions speak for themselves.

Since Jeanne is the heart of the film, this is expressed visually by her placement in the still frame. She is centered precisely within it, and unless she moves from one room to another, Akerman not only holds the camera steady but holds the shot as well. There are no cuts except when absolutely necessary, and Jeanne is almost always on screen. Akerman's cinema focuses our attention on her smallest gestures, gestures that reveal character but would be lost in a more flamboyant film: a knife that almost slips when a potato is peeled, a light turned off unnecessarily, a facial expression of disquiet or of frustration, the curious act of making coffee in a thermos in the morning for drinking at lunchtime. The effect of such details, repeated and ritualized, is cumulative. Slowly the portrait is pieced together.

Amazingly, Akerman was only 25 when she made this film. I am in awe of her achievement and her courage and will finish with this quote about it: “Because Akerman's scenario and her realization of it are so provocatively heterogeneous, and because the interpretations of the film's place in the canon of great cinema are so varied (and also because Akerman's editing rhythms and pacing are as methodical and unhurried as Stanley Kubrick's), some have called it the "domestic 2001."

The burbs

The burbs – it’s a naff term isn’t it. Been thinking about the nature of suburban living lately – prompted by The Slap and by the film My Year Without Sex. “Suburban” – it’s onomatopoeic, I think. I read The Slap a few months ago and then my bookclub discussed it. It was interesting for what it brought up for most of us – there was common view that the characters were awful, they were indicative of the changing times but did not reflect the characteristics of the people that we hang round with. I sat there feeling middle aged – it’s the kind of spin I would have despised when I was younger but have to watch it coming off my tongue so readily. Is The Slap about generational change or class? Or ethnicity? Or gender? I thought it began with great promise but lost some of the gloss about half way through. The women characters seemed like a pastiche of the glossy women you sometimes see in The Age, women in their late 30s with hair extensions and a permanent diet. Not quite real. The men on the other hand seemed entirely believable. And pretty awful with the exception of Ritchie and the indigenous man who seems to be there to fill up the ethnic diversity numbers in the book. An indigenous Muslim. Tick two boxes.

What I connected with was the setting. These characters come from the middle ring of suburbs: Northcote, Hampton. People who’ve done OK materially and are aiming to hang on to every bit of it. The kind of people that my sister hangs out with. They have pools and undisclosed sources of wealth. We joke about these coming from drugs but the sources are more likely to be more banal. It makes my sister envious. These people are competitive and use their children as shining little examples of their upward mobility. They attend private schools and toddler yoga. There’s a brittleness to this kind of existence. And in Tsiolkas’ book, a meanness of spirit. The text is a hugely energetic rampage through the suburbs and through this meanness. I don’t see it in the circle of people I know and maybe that means that I live in a bubble. One of the bookclub members, a woman who has a lot to do with schools, said she was at a meeting of principals a couple of years ago and their main issue was that students are coming to school “under-parented” (to quote her). Their parents are giving them fewer boundaries , spending more time working, and want to be friend rather than adult. Her take was that they were relying on schools to do the tough love. This isn’t necessarily what I see amongst my friends though the extended independent/dependent relationship that kids have into their 20s might be indicative of this.

I could write more about The Slap (the sex they are having doesn’t sound like the sex that a lot of my married friends are having) but I might go to My Year Without Sex, a film which is also set in Melbourne suburbia; albeit a slightly less middle class suburbia. It’s a quirky little film, a lighter take than Watts’ previous film Look Both Ways. Funny. Light. Unsubstantial.

Three things about it. The best scene happens early. The main character Natalie (Sascha Horler) is in hospital hovering in and out of a coma. While she is likely to live, it’s a tense bedside scene, the whole family around her. Her son is transfixed by the television screen. We see him with the earphones on, his face tense; he’s watching the Western Bulldogs at the 30 minute mark of a tight game. He’s holding his breath. I’ve been there – in that moment, forgetting to breathe, everything hinging round a kick at goal. Life or death. For him, like his mother – both in life or death moments. Nicely done. Ordinary but utterly important.

They have so much stuff. In a more heavy handed way, this film is a critique of suburban materialism. They exist in family squalor; made more pronounced by the crappy quality of everything they own. They are swamped by toys, clothes, furniture, accoutrements of modern life. It contrasts with the minimalism of the more wealthy extended family that they hang out with – if you’re richer, your stuff is not as overwhelming.

There’s a fascinating spiritual question embedded in this film. It’s prompted me to ask all my religious mates whether they expect to see me once we are both dead. Clearly some of them haven’t thought of this before which is interesting in itself. Worth seeing for the gentle conversation about the need (or not) for spirituality in the suburbs.

My Year Without Sex is about decent people trying to have a go. Like the latest film I’ve seen, Sunshine Cleaning. Not a lot to say about that film. I liked it. Quirky. Good characters trying to make a go of it. Unlike any of the characters in The Slap apart from the teenagers and the Muslims. Does it matter if you don’t like any of the people in a text? I don’t think so but it clearly matters to some; for most of the people who’ve hated The Slap, I think this has been their primary reason. They feel infected by the meanness. Maybe that means that it is a successful novel?

Gomorrah and the doings in Ascot Vale

I am a big Sopranos fan but have long thought it belonged with The West Wing as a study of power and family rather than a focus on organised crime. I think this is because we grow into a kind of affection for Tony Soprano which is at odds with what he really does that is brutal and ugly and evil. Seeing the Italian film Gomorrah has confirmed my thoughts about that. Gomorrah focuses on the ordinary people who willingly or not are caught up in the workings of organised crime in contemporary Naples. It’s about evil, entrapment, poverty and corruption, following five stories of people who, unlike Tony, have little power and authority. One film critic describes it like this: “Gomorrah is the mob movie as postapocalyptic warning, shot with dark precision inside dingy and overcrowded apartment complexes whose crumbling concrete and peeling paint make a mockery of the beautiful landscape outside” and in the New York Times: “no dark jokes; no catchy pop songs; no film allusions; no winking fun; no thrilling violence”. The violence is there all the time in the background, like a horrible sort of tinnitus, not in the forefront of the action.

Gomorrah works on a suburban level. The characters we meet are the kids on the street in Sunshine, the guy who runs the sweated workshop in Maidstone, the collector for the organised crime who operates out of a café in Union Rd Ascot Vale. The café where I buy good home-made tagliatelli to cook at home. In the film, we see the “western suburbs” style housing commission area of Naples. It’s grimy and claustrophobic; everyone seems to know everyone’s business. Unlike Melbourne, these areas of Naples are really run down; people are living in considerable squalor.

The film intertwines the stories of about five sets of characters. My favourite character is the master tailor. He is a middle aged man who has great skills within his trade but, for inexplicable circumstances, is running a sweatshop of workers who are running up designer clothes that will be sold on at very high prices. At one stage, we see a TV shot of Scarlett Johansson wearing one of the gowns. In moonlighting for a Chinese businessman, the tailor’s skills are finally appreciated by the workers he is teaching to make couture clothes but we as an audience are rightly filled with a sense of doom as he goes about his work. He is an ordinary man, attracted by the idea of making more money; the beauty of the film is that we meet him mid story with no idea of how he became involved with the sweatshop business. It is normal.

Two teenage characters help carry the film; they are gangster wannabes who carry out a serious of crimes in defiance of the local crime overlords. They are hapless and stupid boys, full of machismo and adolescence. I’ve taught heaps of them. Some of the kids I taught in the west have ended up in organised crime; some were young apprentices of their older brothers, uncles and dads while they were still at school. A natural kind of trajectory for them, like the kids in Naples. But most of the kids I taught had more options.

Here in Victoria, I think we see organised crime as something that happens to other people; it enables us to follow the stories of the Morans with amusement rather than fear. The Underbelly series has increased the theatricality of what is essentially a world of boguns and lowlifes. In Gomorrah, it seems to overlay life for everyone. Roger Ebert describes it like this:

“You watch with growing dread. This is no life to lead. You have the feeling the men at the top got there laterally, not through climbing the ladder of promotion. The Camorra seems like a form of slavery, with the overlords inheriting their workers. The murder code and its enforcement keep them in line: They enforce their own servitude.Did the book and the movie change things? Not much, I gather. The film offers no hope. I like gangster movies. "

The Godfather" is one of the most popular movies ever made -- most beloved, even. I like them as movies, not as history. We can see here they're fantasies. I'm reminded of mob
bosses like Frank Costello walking into Toots Shor's restaurant in that
fascinating documentary "Toots." Everyone was happy to see him: Jackie Gleason, Joe
DiMaggio, everyone. At least they knew who he was. The men running the Camorra
are unknown even to those who die for them."

I was struck by one thing particularly. Three cultures appear in the film: Italians, Columbians and Chinese. In each case its a bunch of guys sitting around, drinking coffee or smoking drugs (the Columbians). Deals are being done but there is a sense of leisure. Time to talk and chew the fat, eat good food. The women are elsewhere. Not running organsied crime. Occasionally the recipients of the proceeds of organsised crime but more often the widows and mothers worried about their kids. Would the world be different if women were running things? Would there be a Gomorrah? I don't know but I'm grateful I'm not a poor woman in Naples.

In its lack of sensationalism and hype, this is a terrific film.

Despair

About a quarter of the way into Synecdoche, I had to make a decision. Whether to go with it or not. It makes demands of the viewer in a similar way to the film You, the living. The scene which triggered this feeling is one of the less successful ones; a woman is being shown around a house by a real estate agent as smoke is billowing from its walls. Silly. Surreal. Kaufman, the writer-director on drugs. A lot of people will describe this film as a pretentious wank. And while I think it’s a head – job, it’s way more interesting than the pretensions on the surface. What it is in fact is a journey into the psyche – the psyche of the main character, Caden Cotard, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Cotard has been abandoned by his wife who wishes he was dead. (”I wish he was dead; it would be cleaner”, she tells their therapist as he sits there, blank-faced, numb.) Shortly after, she takes their young daughter and goes to live in Germany. Cotard is ill, ageing and filled with despair. He is a play director which gives Kaufman the opportunity to set a fiction within the fictions – or a set of fictions. In reality, what he is exploring is the rubbish which fills our heads. We are privy to Cotard’s paranoias, fantasies and self-talk. It’s done really cleverly through the play within the play construct so Cotard has a set of actors playing himself and other key people in his life. Through them, we see his imaginings, his preferred dialogue, possible scenarios written and re-written. At times too, there is a voice in his ear which helps him decide what to do. It is a film about Everyman and about one man, with despair the prevailing motif. Once again I am watching a film about an ageing man.

I think it’s a really brave film because it’s trying to depict what happens in the brain. Anyone’s brain. The reviewer in The Times describes it well:

“There is some bitter, anguished humour here, but the overriding tone is a deep, aching melancholy. There are numerous possible interpretations of the film, but the constant in all possible readings is the film’s immutable sadness. Does it work? Not always.Kaufman’s ambition occasionally overshoots his skill as a director. But this is a curious and bleakly beautiful piece of work that rewards repeated viewings.”

The title, Synecdoche, is emblematic of the film; hard to say, pretentious, yet trying to say something of real meaning. It means an image in which the part stands for the whole - for example, "head of cattle" meaning cow, or "crown" meaning king. The part is emblematic of the whole. Cotard‘s headspace is symbolic of what is true for all of us, his huge, mad, pasteboard world stands for the real world, is part of it, is superimposed on to it, and finally melts into it.

I also saw Samson and Delilah yesterday. Two films about despair in the one day. They both open in the same way, someone waking up and getting out of bed. In Synecdoche, Hoffman is blearily surrounded by ordinary domesticity, by the demands of the alarm clock and a daughter and telephone. His entry into the day is slow and tired. In the Australian film, we see Samson wake up into the curtain-muted morning light of an outback morning. His bedding is dishevelled and he gropes for a shirt to put on before he gets out of bed. He then gropes for a containner of petrol to sniff. Good morning Samson. Its really hard to watch. Like Hoffman, Samson is slow to start the day. This contrasts with the outdoor waking of Delilah and her nana. Delilah more purposefully and immediately tends to her grandmother’s needs. It’s outback Australia, somewhere on a small remote community surrounded by the beautiful red rock of the area.

Delilah is the one who does the tending in the film which otherwise lacks tenderness. It is bleak in the extreme. After it had finished, my friend Naomi and I talked for a long time about it. The depicted options for indigenous people are few. Down the creek with petrol. On a community with little to do and little (depicted) connection or tenderness. Being exploited by Western art dealers. Getting God. Or getting right away from anyone else. The characters are shown as having little or no agency (with the exception of Delilah, who may get hers from God). I wonder how indigenous people feel about this kind of positioning. The dysfunctionality is the primary motif.

I don’t know what to do with this film. David Stratton gave it 5 stars and described it as “one of the finest films ever made in this country”. It’s definitely about the most important topic that we are likely to see on Australians screens and I think it’s really well made. I especially liked the lack of dialogue though I’ve never known teenagers to say as little as these two. But, and this is not the film’s fault, we are left with the certain knowledge that the film could be a documentary; that it illustrates the reality of life for lots of indigenous kids and that every few people know what to do about this. It’s bleak. Blogger Jane Simpson says:

“David Stratton's review is entitled "A world beyond words" and words are what's absent in the film. Everyday chat, everyday laughter, everyday interaction, doing things together, all the things that make life on outstations much less bleak than the portrayal here. And the family connections are missing - are Delilah and Samson two lost children without parents, sisters, brothers, cousins, who no one looks out for? Or indeed without fellow petrol-sniffers?”

The thing that happened to me as I watched it was a kind of splitting – which often happens when I watch films about other cultures. I’m more tolerant of values that are at odds with mine; I sit there and think “Well that’s their culture”. I’m prepared to tolerate weirdnesses, bad singing (Tulpan) and other little things. In the instance of this film, it played out in this way. The first part of the film begins with Samson’s courtship of Delilah. She is not interested in him. She makes this clear. She’s not playing games; she repeatedly pushes him away. On only one occasion during the initial part of the film (she buys him food) does she show any positive feeling. She knows that he is trouble. But I think we are positioned to want them to be together (even through their names) even though Samson is going to be nothing but trouble for Delilah. Jane Simpson’s blog entry sums up my misgivings about this aspect of the film in this analysis of the ending:

“The end is a fairytale ending, perhaps a fantasy of male hope - that a beautiful young woman would leave her own car and gun to go off with a petrol-sniffer, come back and find the car and gun still working, that she would have her own outstation, and would then dedicate herself to looking after the brain-damaged, wheel-chair-bound petrol-sniffer on her own. Julie Rigg takes this as the commitment demanded by love. I take it as obsession. Good outcome for Samson, lousy for Delilah.”

Having said that, Warwick Thornton is a very talented filmmaker. I loved his short film Nanna. The actors in Samson and Delilah are great. I loved the small surprises in the narrative. It‘s a really important film. I hope it does really well. It‘s more worthy of attention than Synecdoche – one being a cerebral head-job and one almost a documentary. About us. Australians. And both about despair.

Homage to Marilyn

Not Monroe but French. The writer of The Womens’ Room. Two books had a profound impact on me in the 70s. The World According to Garp and The Women’s Room. It’s a funny combination but they do have some things in common. Marilyn French died recently. I bet she had a significant impact on a lot of women. When my friend Jane and I went walking the other day, she mentioned her death and the impact that she had on her life as well. Her novel made me aware of aspects of my own life, especially the relationship I was then in (in the 70s) and ultimately I broke up with Geoff as a result of this awareness. Marilyn French helped embed the feminism I had; she had a greater impact than Germaine Greer and Simone de Beauvoir on me. I wonder what The Womens’ Room would be like now?

Treacherous ground, the relationship

“The penis, in the contemporary novel, has been a mighty matter, looming large.” I wish so much that I had written this sentence but it was that mighty writer Colm Toibin, commenting on Ian McEwan’s novel On Chesil Beach. Toibin goes on to say “Who will forget the narrator of The Bell Jar seeing an adult penis for the first time and being both fascinated and repelled? (‘The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed.’)”, This London Review of Books review is well worth a read just for the extended riff about the penis.

It wasn’t the penis that got my attention in the novel (funnily enough). This is a novel which pivots on the first night of a marriage. Set in 1962, it's about Florence and Edward. “They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible. But it is never easy. “ What interested me was Florence’s lack of interest in sex. Not just lack of interest but a feeling of revulsion; when Edward starts to kiss her, she contemplates throwing up.

I know that it’s possible to go for extended times without sex and without thinking of sex. (Only one of these characteristics applies to me.) Libido is a rare topic of conversation with my friends but sometimes we talk about it. Usually in an embarrassed way; no one really knows what is “normal”. Do you like sex? Is it good with your partner? Are there things you’d like to do? Have done to you? Does the other person want it more or less than you do? How do you manage the imbalance? Who do you lust after? What turns you on? For a theme that is explored at such length in the media, it is really hard to talk about. (And hard often to talk about with your lover or partner too but that's probably a whole other piece of writing.)

Florence finds it hard to talk about. She feels abnormal. I found it strange to read about; its not something I can imagine easily – the extreme distaste she has for sex. I wanted to read more, to find out why, and this provides some of the dramatic tension of the novel. At first I thought the writing was a little coy. Mark Mordue, writing in the SMH, reframes the coyness: “Initially, McEwan's writing is restrained and formal, a quintessentially British tone befitting the time in which it is set. One thinks of old BBC radio plays and "hears" the story being told. It would be easy to mistake this as tame fare indeed but for a sly humour and confidence percolating beneath McEwan's voice: “This was not a good moment in the history of English cuisine, but no one much minded at the time except visitors from abroad. The formal meal began, as so many did then, with a slice of melon decorated by a glazed cherry… It would not have crossed Edward’s mind to have ordered a red.”” The coy tone is deliberate; it reflects the times, the characters and the seriousness with which they are about to embark on sex, and on intimacy.

Because this is what I think the book is really about – not so much sex as marriage and what it means to make this commitment. What might be lost in the process as well as gained. There is a really graphic description of being kissed; “With his lips clamped firmly on hers, he probed the fleshy floor of her mouth, then moved round inside the teeth of her lower jaw to the empty place where three years ago a wisdom tooth had crookedly grown until removed under general anaesthesia. This cavity was where her own tongue usually strayed when she was lost in thought. By association, it was more like an idea than a location, a private, imaginary place rather than a hollow in her gum, and it seemed peculiar to her that another tongue should be able to go there too. It was the hard tapering tip of this alien muscle, quiveringly alive, that repelled her.” (p29) Of course this is about sex but I think it’s also about the process of marrying someone and living with them. Florence is a very controlling, independent personality who has not experienced the joys of intimacy (her family has not provided warmth or contact). The idea of intimacy, and perhaps losing something of herself in the process, scares Florence as much as the physicalities of sex. And the ending bears this out; you have to allow people into the hidden gaps to truly make contact. It’s a risk but the consequence of avoiding risk is borne out in what happens to both Edward and Florence.

What makes me think that McEwen wanted to go beyond sex is the title. He is fond of the single, life-changing incident (almost all his novels pivot round a single incident) but this novel has a very deliberate title which I think takes us further than the single failed sexual encounter of E and F. I googled the beach after I’d finished the book; it’s a really striking piece of coastline. A long narrow spit (18 miles?) with a lagoon on the land side and the sea on the other. Rocky. Treacherous. McEwen said that he kept some rocks from the beach on his desk while he was writing it (and protests after he admitted this meant that he took them back!) Chesil Beach is a storm beach developed by gravel ridges being driven onshore. It was described like this by one poet:
“Twern't a sea - not a bit of it -
twer the great sea hisself rose up level like
and come on right over the ridge and all,
like nothing in this world"

I think McEwen is thinking about the beach as a metaphor for being in a relationship. One reviewer described the spit as being the line between post-war, conservative Britain (the land and lagoon) and the tempestuous changes of the 60’s (the sea) and while its true that this is a strong theme in the book, it’s a bit lumpen as a metaphor. (And if I was being really crude, you could read this bit of verse and look at how McEwen describes Edward’s premature ejaculation – a great piece of writing). However, I think he chose the landscape deliberately to make a point; it could have been set in Torquay or a host of less interesting locations.

A lot of the writing is very fine and that makes the book worth reading, whatever you think it's about: “The garden vegetation rose up, sensuous and tropical in its profusion, an effect heightened by the grey, soft light and a delicate mist drifting in from the sea, whose steady motion of advance and withdrawal made sounds of gentle thunder, then sudden hissing against the pebbles.” And finally, worth a comparison – Philip Larkin’s poem, Annus Mirabilus.

Let the right one in

“The question of what comprises a ‘good childhood’ in current times has generated significant debate and media attention. While there has always been debate about children, today it is especially salient because of the fast pace of change in information and communication technology and because of the perceived pressures of a consumer-based media culture. According to the charity The Children’s Society, which has conducted a major inquiry into childhood, children’s overall well-being is being endangered by excessive individualism in a competitive modern age. It suggests that the increase in the belief that the “prime duty of the individual is to make the most of her own life, rather than contribute to the good of others” has tilted British culture too far “towards the individual pursuit of private interest and success” with several consequences for children:
- high rates of family break-up
- teenage unkindness
- unprincipled advertising
- too much competition in education
- acceptance of income inequality.”

Been reading this today for work. It’s a paper from Futurelab about curriculum and innovation. I’m always a bit suspicious of the good old days argument. Were we or or parents and grandparents more alive to the good of others? I’m not sure. (I think my father’s generation was better at saving, at “doing without”, but that’s another matter). I was thinking about teenage unkindness this week in the context of the Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In. Luke Davies, in The Monthly, correctly calls this a “gloriously strange and haunted poem of a film”. The screenplay is written by John Lindqvist who also wrote the best selling novel and the film is made by Tomas Alfredson.

Philip French from the Guardian wrote this apropos of the film: "Three of Scandinavia's greatest artists, the Swedish playwright August Strindberg, his friend the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch and the Danish director Carl Dreyer were fascinated by the subject. Virtually all Strindberg heroines are vampires. Munch's most famous painting after The Scream is his Vampyr, while Dreyer's Vampyr is arguably the greatest of all horror films."

I’ve had several encounters with the vampire genre over the years; the sensationally scary Salem’s Lot (Stephen King), the languid and hip, overhyped Anne Rice novels and more recently The Historian ( Elizabeth Kostova). I remember lying in bed in my parents house reading Stephen King scared out of my wits with the dark glass of the night window only inches away and the possibility of vampires just outside. That was 30 years ago – other things scare me more now. What was scary in Let the Right One In was the depiction of adolescence because that is what the film is fundamentally about. Oskar is 12, a lonely bullied boy who is disconnected from his divorced parents. Like most teenagers, he inhabits a little world of his own. He meets Eli, a dishevelled “12 year old” street girl of a vampire.

The vampire riff works fine as a straight narrative but underneath it is a metaphor for the disturbances of adolescence. Blood. Changing bodies. Uncontrollable events and urges. Stuff that you want to do that is forbidden. Desire. Danger. Fitting in or more usually – not fitting in. Loss of innocence – whatever this means in our society. Disconnection and loneliness – the film deals with these threads so well. The violence of adolescence is played out in all sorts of ways in this film including through Oskar who we meet when he is stabbing a tree with a knife (which is handily standing in for one of his classmates).

It’s also beautifully filmed. Luke Davies says it better than I could: “the stillness, - of framing, of pacing – catches us unawares, in the sense that, as in all good ghost stories, we are lulled unsuspecting into that place where the real and the surreal become interchangeable”. The setting is both banal – suburban Sweden, an apartment block, a school, and really beautiful – crisp snow, slender birches, a white dog against the snow. (A white dog against the snow discovering a body hefted upside down from a tree dripping blood – yes it is a vampire film.) That’s the other thing I loved about the film; Eli is by turns kind of fetching street kid and mouth covered in blood, pretty grisly. It looks real and a bit grotesque. And vulnerable. These two, Eli and Oskar, are kind to each other in this world of teenage unkindness and adult neglect. The film has a great ending. It makes you re-think some of the earlier scenes in new ways. The narrative is left open and ambiguous like the character of Eli. Lovely work.

"How am I blest in thus discovering thee!”

Been thinking about the word Elegy after seeing the film of that name. John Donne was really the Elegy man and this thought sent me googling the connection. The first one I came across was Elegy XX To his mistress going to bed. Like a lot of Donne’s poetry, it’s about making the most of the limited time we have. In his world view, its best spent in bed with a lover (apart from the time taken with wondering what happens after you die). Sex and death weighed heavily on the man. I liked re-discovering him- here's a snippet from that poem.

“Licence my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O, my America, my Newfoundland,
My kingdom, safest when with one man mann'd,
My mine of precious stones, my empery;
How am I blest in thus discovering thee!”

The word elegy is more usually used to mean a song of mourning and perhaps Donne is thinking of the ephemeralness of this relationship and the frailties of the human bodies, both his and his lovers. As the title of the recent film, it is less harsh than the title of the novel it represents “The Dying Animal”. Roth’s book and this film is about David Kupesh, a man in his 60s who falls in love with a much younger woman played by Penelope Cruz.

The opening of the film shows him in his New York apartment quoting from Tolstoy: "The biggest surprise in a man's life is old age." This quote has the kind of truth about it that made me want to agree out loud in the cinema. Age has been much on my mind lately, not just my own but the people around me. I thought about my father who seems constantly bemused by the treachery of his body. On the weekend he said to me “I used to be an athlete; I could run 100 yards in X (I think he said 11 but this cannot be right) seconds.” He can’t understand where this fitness has gone, what has happened to him. It’s unbearably sad. And perhaps that means that what happens to Kupesh in the film is sad but not tragic (in comparison with my father who is 80 and tragically sad.) After all, Kupesh has the beautiful Cruz fall in love with him.

Kupesh is something of a tosser but the universality of the aging process is the compelling part of this film. It’s the third film I‘ve seen about aging men this year which perhaps tells us something about the demographics of current film producers. And audiences. But ultimately I had to agree partly with Monalah Dargis in the New York Times: “There’s not a hair out of place here or an emotion. It’s as if Ms. Coixet (the director) had tried to quiet the howls of a dying animal.” I thought the film would end about 20 minutes before it did; there is a twist in the plot that shifts our perspective somewhat. What the twist raised for me is the question – do we feel more keenly for the really beautiful? Would the impact be the same if the plot twist was applied to Kupesh’s older lover? (A woman who I identified with quite strongly). Would that have made the story more interesting? Made us forget the twee beach love scenes that populate the early part of the film?

Cruz plays the role as a cipher; unknowable in her beauty. This tease of the audience is set up quite early when Kupesh first sees her – she is carrying a copy of Roland Barthes “The Pleasures of the Text”. And Kupesh’s friend says something along the lines of the unknowability of the truly beautiful woman; it is a complete distraction. I don’t think that Mr Donne would have agreed but he was truly a renaissance man. Head and heart. Go John. He was up for it – the howl of a dying animal in a way that this film isn’t quite. Re-reading Donne's words, there's a robustness and energy that is never felt in the film; the Kupesh character is way too restrained and melancholy. at one stage, Kupesh compares the Cruz character to a painting by Goya and the relationship has that element; a woman reclining to be admired, a woman looking lovely on the beach, a man looking sad in a darkened apartment. Somehow the blood has left this film. I'm going back to Donne for a bit more sex and death... And maybe Philip Roth. And definitely John Updike.

Ego integrity and despair

I like listening to Radiotherapy on RRR on Sunday mornings. It’s a bunch of doctors chewing over medical stuff and sometimes they do film reviews. I don’t know if it’s the same reviewer every time but he often comes at things from a psychoanalytic POV – often quite a different take on films. Yesterday he reviewed Gran Torino which he and I both liked. He talked about Erik Erikson’s work on the 8 stages of man – the last one is Ego Integrity vs. Despair - old age. “Some handle death well. Some can be bitter, unhappy, dissatisfied with what they accomplished or failed to accomplish within their life time. They reflect on the past, and conclude at either satisfaction or despair.” (Wikipedia)

This had huge resonance for me because I think this is where my father is at; reflecting on his life and in his case, I think he fluctuates between the two Erikson categories of despair and ego integrity. In the case of Gran Torino, it’s Clint Eastwood who plays an angry, lonely old bastard, a man who has just lost his wife and who has the slightest of relationships with his family. I’m not going to write at length about the film; I liked it despite the fact that most of the plot is a basic redemption plot - dysfunctional person is led to a better, happier life almost in spite of himself. It is also about the Hmong community in the USA, a community I know a little about because of the book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. While Gran Torino is not a great film, the baddies (Hmong gangsters) look like total baddies and it is largely though not entirely predictable, it was oddly satisfying seeing this old curmudgeon gradually accept friendship even though he never lost the surface elements of racism. I really enjoyed it. We love seeing bad guys get what they deserve. And Eastwood obviously had a lot of fun with the non-PC aspects of the character he plays - there are some very funny moments. He is great – and brave – he looks his age. Which is old.

I thought of the film gain yesterday after watching The Wrestler which I thought was great. Mickey Rourke was playing a man at the end of his wrestling career, held together by steroids, bandages and headlines from the glory years of his character, “Randy the Ram”. His life is crap: trailer park trash, he’s lonely, broke and damaged. Like Eastwood, he has fucked up relations with the only family he has, his daughter. It’s a stretch applying the Erikson stage to it because Rourke’s character is, I think, meant to be in his fifties but steroid abuse and the damages perpetuated by wrestling have really aged him and one of the events in the film causes him to want to change his life. Rourke is really fabulous. It’s painful watching him try to connect with the lap-dancer character played by Marissa Tomei. He is embarrassingly gauche and shambling with the Tomei character Cassie/Pam, as he also is with his daughter. The Cassie/Pam character has a twofold purpose in the film; she represents new possibilities for Randy and her own life parallels his – they are both struggling with jobs that require a specific and damaging kind of performance that is at odds with the “real” or regular lives that other people live. Both have a performance persona, they frock up (or down in Tomei’s case), they play for the punters and suffer humiliations as a result. (One of the best scenes in the film shows the small cohort of deadbeat wrestlers seated at card tables in a community hall, selling videos (not DVDs) of past glories and signing autographs for the meagre numbers of fans that trawl through this bleak and wintery town)

I can’t do justice to the treatment of wrestling in the film. It is remarkable. The wrestling scenes are violent and theatrical and there were segments in the film which were hard to sit through even though I watched knowing that it was all about performance. Like lap-dancing. The film avoids predictability; I thought it was great. In an interview conducted by James Rocchi, director Aronofsky credited a 1957 Charles Mingus song "The Clown," an instrumental piece with a poem read over the music about a clown who accidentally discovers the bloodlust of the crowds and eventually kills himself in performance, as a major source of inspiration for the movie.

The toy soldiers of our emotional armoury

I liked this description of childhood by novelist Craig Sherbourne. He was writing about Sonya Hartnett's new book. I once upset her at a Writers Forum by suggesting that she should write for adults; that she was in some way limiting what she was capable of by doing the YA thing. I didn't express myself very well and she took umbrage on behalf of all teenagers. I think she has now found her adult voice – I really like her writing. This is what Craig said.

“If we didn’t have childhoods we’d be much better people. We’d start out as grown-ups innocent as lambs. We wouldn’t have behind us all those early years of practising vices: greed, duplicity, cruelty, bullying, indolence, vandalism, bullshitting, cronyism, hypocrisy, selfishness, violence. Childhood is where we hone these skills. If by age 14 we haven’t learned how to manipulate our loved ones, we’re backward and doomed to live at the mercy of others. Parents, siblings, schoolmates, schoolteachers – there’s always one we’ve got a crush on and torture with flirting – are the toy soldiers with which we practise emotional warfare.”

Bleak hey? You can read more in The Monthly. My friend Jane and I spent part of yesterday talking about how lucky we were to have the childhoods we have. We both reckon we have less baggage than lots of others because we were much loved and quite well parented… Better tell Dad before I kill him – he is tormenting me at present…

Craig said some other interesting things about Sonya - he reckons she is a hedgehog style writer "Many books, same story", every novel is the "unpeeling of every layer of that vision". I think he's right - wonder how Sonya will respond...

All class

If I landed on Mars in a version of a Martian secondary school I would be able to teach. This is comforting. I’ve kind of known this anyway, since I had to entertain 200 Years 11 and 12 Chinese students for an hour in a hall in Yunnan province but nice to have the confirmation. I went to see the film The Class on the weekend. The French title is better: “Between the walls”. This title references the small, intense, claustrophobic world which is the essence of the teaching experience. As an adult, it can be lonely and frustrating but also intimate. Director Cantet creates the sense of frustration really well, especially in the first half of the film. The teacher, played by the guy who wrote the book which underpins the film, a man who IS a teacher, is trying to teach some grammar. It’s boring, not pitched at where the kids are at and, as the kids point out, seemingly irrelevant. It’s high culture, formal speech. All English teachers have been there at some time; “Why do we need to know this?” As a viewer, it’s incredibly hard to endure. It’s like being in the classroom. All the teachers in the audience (and there were lots – all my age, daggy shorts, ill-fitting T shirts, little white middle aged stick legs and a paunch or three) were aching to shout “Stop! There are better ways of doing this!”

I was thrown back into the tussle that teaching can be; the tussle for control, order, engagement, forward progress. The way momentum can shift so fast to knock you off balance. The callousness of teenagers. The smell of blood. It can be pretty primal. Francois, the teacher, doesn’t have much fun. This film is about as real a narrative about the job as any I’ve seen.

The second half of the film focuses on a student in trouble. It’s more dramatic but no less real. I have seen teachers escalate trouble, intentionally and by accident, about a thousand times in the 19 years I was a teacher. And I’ve done it myself. Probably more than I want to remember. Easy to critique from the back of the room but you try being the one up the front with 25 lounging adolescents ripe for a bit of a struggle. Francois fucks up. He means well but he fucks up. And then it kind of goes pear-shaped for everyone because the school is bound to support the institutional power relationships. Bound in a kind of unstated and complex arrangement of power, authority and support. Bound because there is a tacit agreement with the people who are in the front line doing the intimate and personal thing that is teaching that you will support them in the process. So what the viewer gains is a small taste of the struggle for a school when a student pushes the last boundary. The film conveys a sense of the investment made in the child, the relationship, the sense of loss at the waste of the efforts of all. And a despair at what might happen to the kid. And anger of course and sometimes relief. The common good argument. It’s all there in this classy film – pun intended.

Lots of critics have written about the way the film has been constructed – student volunteers, loose plot. The success of the film is down to its essential truthfulness; the people making it wanted to show what the work of a teacher is – tedium and all. I’ve been talking about the job with people I work with; we were talking about lesson plans and I admitted that I probably hadn’t done one since about my second year of teaching. I wasn’t much of a teacher then but they didn’t suit me as a way of organising myself. What I ended up saying in that conversation is that your success as a teacher partly depends on pretty quickly having a good sense of how you wanted to be in Role, capital “R” role, and the closer that the Capital R role is to your own sense of self, the better. Then your persona is consistent and predictable and genuinely grounded. It‘s not a stretch – you’d be able to feel, as Francois perhaps didn’t – that where he was heading with kids was down a whole lot of alleyways that were dead-ends. Maybe.

The Monthly critic Luke Davis ends his review of this film by saying “Francois is like the character Glory Boughton in the Marilynn Robinson novel Home who comes to understand, of the children she taught for many years, that her role as a teacher had essentially been that of “helping them assume their humanity.” On first reading, this resonated but it’s not the kind of language which Australians could use about themselves. I see it as trying to have kids get a sharper sense of themselves and the wider world; of what makes it all tick and what they think about it. And why. And to be curious about what other people think. That’s about it. And some skills to communicate. That’s it. That’s enough. (and BTW - I think Luke's pushing it a bit with this description of Francois - calling a couple of teenage girls "skanks" might be a natural human reaction to an incident in the film, but this and the ensuing events hardly amount to helping those particular kids "assume their humanity".)

I haven’t written enough here about fun. Those kids looked like they’d be fun. I taught in schools like this for most of my teaching life and there is lots of fun to be had, lots of interest to make you hang around amidst the tedium of perrenial staffroom stuff, government directives, union meetings, students wearing caps in class and the rest. The film triggered one of my ongoing desires – to teach again. It comes and goes and is tempered by the memory of the boot-full of correction that dogged my life. Maybe I’ll go back one day.

How you look at life?

Been mulling this over in terms of my life - Justice Michael Kirby is reported as saying "You have to look at life as if it's a grand nineteenth century novel. A Joseph Conrad tale. This highway robbery, that love affair, now this time of servitude. And so on." Been wondering if my life is like a 19th century novel or some other form. It's easier to describe others - the guy I work with - his life is like a military handbook; marked by strategy and defensive play. Mine - I'm not so sure...

Life is short and then you die

The length of a film is not the best grounds for choosing which one to watch but the over 40’s Melbourne temperatures of last week made the decision easy. Find the longest film on offer at the closest cinema. And so I went to see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I liked it more than I expected even though I have an automatic resistance to these kinds of films. By this I mean extremely polished, expensive, emotionally manipulative films from the Hollywood stable. I don’t like crying over crap or having sentiment front and centre as a device. I don’t much like Brad Pitt as an actor either. Less pretty is good. And this film is all about pretty – in lots of ways. (And on the Brad topic, I loved this critique of him from film critic A O Scott in the New York Times; “Mr. Pitt seems more interested in the nuances of reticence than in the dynamics of expression”. Originally John Travolta was to have had the role; he would have been a better choice.)

So, what‘s to like? Almost every scene looks like a scene from a picture-story book, with the exception of the “modern” scenes which contrast nicely. The historical scenes are filmed in a luminous sort of candlelight which makes then look both rich and mysterious. I’m sure that part of the reason for this would have been the need to cleverly manage the process of ageing Brad backwards; he is born in the guise of a very old man and becomes younger as the film develops. So soft lighting is important; as the Brad character, Benjamin becomes younger, his co-star, Cate Blanchett, playing Daisy, has to age. The scenes are visually striking; lush and dramatic. It's a lovely film to look at.

The picture story book effect provides the film with licence to be melodramatic. A baby is close to being thrown in the river by his father, a tugboat is blown to bits at war, a woman is knocked down by a car, Hurricane Katrina is whirling round the edges of the modern story. It’s a fable. And provided you accept that it’s a fable, it’s quite satisfying.

A lot of critics have rightly criticised the lack of characterisation in the film. Usually this matters to me but I think this is a film about a larger topic; the passage of time and how humans manage it. It’s about the brief ephemeral intersections of contact and about loss. Loss caused by death and loss caused when people move on or move out of your life.

The most poignant scene for me was late in the film. Benjamin and Daisy intersect many times as she ages and he goes in the opposite direction. After a gap of several years, Benjamin walks through the door of her dance studio and stands, looking at her. She doesn’t initially recognise him. Her face is lined, she is a middle-aged woman. He is a young man, glowing with all the gorgeousness of youth. My mind went immediately to my recent meeting with Geoff, a man I lived with a long time ago. We hadn’t seen each other for many years and so meeting again, were confronted by physical change, by memories of the relationship we had shared and by what was left - nothing really. I felt a sense of loss – not that we no longer had a relationship but that there was nothing left now. No yearning, no nothing. I had the “So what’s it all for?” feeling. It made me feel terribly, terribly sad.

The focus on aging also made me think about my father and his own aging process, the pain of it. It’s painful watching my father go through this. Painful, sad and frustrating. The world becomes smaller and more circumscribed. But not necessarily. Geoff is not in my current life and making that decision decades ago was a good decision. What I have now is rich, lively and full of opportunities. Some options have closed down but I don’t feel like my world is getting smaller; if anything it seems more open-ended and full of promise.

The film comes from a short story written by F Scott Fitzgerald, who had an ongoing preoccupation with the ephemerality of things. I haven’t read it yet but you can download it. The screenplay was written by Eric Roth, who also wrote Forrest Gump. I was pleased when I read this – not because I liked Forrest Gump much but I was reminded of that film while I was watching the Benjamin Button film and I couldn’t work out why – something to do with the over-orchestration of effects and emotions, I think. It’s made me want to go and re-read Scott Fitzgerald which is no bad thing…

The Slap

The empty suburbs
propel them in a fruitless
quest for connection.

Yes, the demon haiku strikes again. Maybe it's better than the "reflection demon" which lurked the other morning - I caught sight of a middle-aged woman with fat arms, wearing my shirt, in the window of the train. Aaargh!

More of The Slap later, but it's definitely part of the zeitgeist. Let if be recorded that I didn't love it but I found the first two thirds quite engrossing...

What if?

You only had a few minutes to pack your bags and escape some horror. When I went overseas for the first time, I stored my first quilt and some photos with my friend Jane but I've become blase now and don't bother doing this when I travel. However, I would be upset if my jewellery, my photos and Dora's paintings went astray.

I've been thinking that one of the reasons I like reading history is that wondering about how I would've coped. Would I have been one of the first to die in the Holocaust or would I have been one of the SonderKommando? I think I would have been pathetic. I've been thinking about how people surrvive as I start Kokoda, a big fat book about WW11 and what happened just north of us.

It begins with the Reverend Nelson, a Christian missionary who, in the face of the Japanese anchoring just off shore, collects together his watch, tobacco, a notebook, pemcil, some hamkies and a compass. I like the inclusion of the hankies, I go into slight panic attack mode if I have no hanky. He is accompanied by 2 women; one of whom is called Mavis Parkinson who says "Scrummy! A real naval battle and we are here watching it. I do wish we knew if they are our troops." (They weren't!) Her colleague, May May Hayman collected up some cans of food in preparation for escape. Mavis took a change of clothes and Rev Benson also threw in some mosquito nest, old blankets and intriguingly, a square of calico. Mayber he was a closet quilter.

In contrast the Japanese troops had a big bag of rice, some bullets, 2 hand grenades, a steel helmet and a toothbrush. They were instructed that if they were thrown in the water, they were to sing songs until help came!

The locals were best prepared for any contingency. Some of the tribes had only just given up head-hunting but still had traditions of "living food", of keeping people alive and just slicing off a bit of leg or buttock when things got tough. I have no stomach for this sort of survival...

Rabbit

Returning to the haiku tradition for Rabbit Redux:

"Suck it and see" is what
Rabbit might have thought
If he thought at all.

Just finished Rabbit is Rich which I loved. Will post some more about this novel which is now almost 30 years old.

Wrangling India

It’s worth seeing Slumdog Millionaire just for the Bombay character which is ever-present. The film begins with a long chase scene through the slums; two small boys followed by a policeman. They have been playing cricket on the tarmac of an airport runway. As you do. It’s a great opening sequence that sets up the whole film; these kids are resilient, cheeky survivors in a city that requires these qualities.

Mumbai/ Bombay was the first Indian city I ever went to. Here is what I wrote back in 2000 about arriving:

“I had been wondering how long it would take for the work 'teeming' to enter the thought process- I had to wait no longer than the Qantas In-flight video where Mumbai was described as "magnificent and teeming" , a "city of contrasts" - great cliché writing. A night journey into Mumbai- hot, heaps of men in the streets, zooming little 3 wheeler auto cabs, no women to be seen anywhere, my driver attempting to keep me awake (4.30 am Melb time) by making a left turn in front of a bus going straight ahead. Buses are invincible in India - just scary in their intent.

A day in Mumbai - caught the train into the 'city' squashed into a carriage full of saris and Jill in her stolid navy! Lovely being with the women and when I finally worked out that I was blocking the way out of the train (10 stops later) they welcomed me and gave me a seat.”

Unlike a lot of my life, I remember this arrival very vividly. I flew in late at night into a world where people careered round in the little mechanised autocabs. I caught one to my hotel in Juhu, a beachside suburb close to the airport which features a bit in Slumdog Millionaire. Juhu was a strange mix of seeming hipness (lots of bars and clubs) and deadset sleaze. Once inside my hotel room I bounced off the walls. I felt frightened and vulnerable. It was my first time overseas by myself.

The next day I planned to go into the “city” to go to the museum. I caught the suburban train. It cost 2 cents. The description above doesn’t do it justice. I missed several trains because they were too full and people sort of waved me off. It took me a while to realise that I was trying to get into the wrong carriage; I should be in the women’s carriages which were at one end of the train. My journey took a long time. It’s no wonder I found India hard going on that trip; there was no cushion of protection from ‘real’ India as I experienced in later trips. It was like being hit over the head with a shovel. I looked at a lot of the scenes in Slumdog Millionaire with a kind of wonderment that I managed it at all. And have been back. And love it.

An English guy, Danny Boyle, made Slumdog Millionaire. I haven’t seen any of his other films. He said that working in India was not like “wrangling India’ as one interviewer suggested; it was like “accumulating India”. It’s a version of “Don’t fight the Ganges”, the very sage advice I learnt on my first trip. The notion of wrangling anything in India is kind of hopeful. Boyle said "I wanted to get (across) the sense of this huge amount of fun, laughter, chat, and sense of community that is in these slums. What you pick up on is this mass of energy." Ironically it's a film about survival when the very process of making the film must have felt about as scary and out of control.

If you accept the film as homage to Bombay, it works about as well as it could. Like being in India you need to go with the heavy melodrama and the obvious villains and innocents. It’s not subtle. The theme of exploitation of slum kids was done a whole lot better by Rohinton Mistry in the novel A Fine Balance and more recently in Animal's People by Indra Sinha. Jamal, the main character in the film, is only interesting for what happens to him and for his doggedness and honesty; he is otherwise without screen exuberance. I probably agree with The New York Times critic Manohla Dargis who says "In the end, what gives me reluctant pause about this bright, cheery, hard-to-resist movie is that its joyfulness feels more like a filmmaker’s calculation than an honest cry from the heart about the human spirit." All true but Boyle gets away with it because of Bombay.

As a postscript, I read Paul Theroux's book The Elephanta Suite recently. I have not loved his writing in the past but I really liked this book which is a collection of three novellas. It's very very self conscious fiction; it's not his comfort zone. It doesn't flow sweetly. But he is wrestling with the encountering of American and Indian cultures and I loved what he was trying to say about the process. Here is a snippet from a review in The Guardian: "Alice, the heroine of the last of these three novellas, 'The Elephant God', a young American woman on a train, feels that Indian novels haven't adequately prepared her for the experience of India. 'Where were the big, fruitful families from these novels, where were the jokes, the love affairs, the lavish marriage ceremonies, the solemn pieties, the virtuous peasants, the environmentalists, the musicians, the magic, the plausible young men?' "That's India for you - big enough for all these stories AND Slumdog and more...